Carry a fountain with you

Chapter 215 Taibai Drunk
Every winter and autumn, the colder the weather, the loose sugar will grow in the gaps in the bark of pine trees and on the soft and fluffy pine needles.

Most of the pine sugar on the pine needles is milky white, the size of a grain of rice, very similar to white sugar, and it tastes sweet, with a more rosy taste than white sugar.

Looking from a distance, the whole pine tree seems to be covered with a thin layer of frost, giving people a very poetic feeling.

In the cracks of pine bark, there are generally reddish sugar grains, which are crystal clear like jade, and are much larger than the sugar grains on pine needles. They are as big as small peas, round, and there are five or six grains in a gap. , more often there are more than 20 grains.

It's just that it's rare to find loose sugar on the bark of the pine tree, and the most common one is on the pine needles.

Liu Junhao remembers that when he was a child, in the late autumn, he would often wander around the mountains with his friends in the village after school.The harvest season has already passed by now, and the figs, wild dates, and apples in the mountains are no longer the objects of interest to the children.Their purpose is very clear, to find loose candy to eat.

A large group of rambunctious children wandered around the mountain. Once someone found a pine tree covered with pine sugar, they immediately shouted loudly, and everyone swarmed around it.

Three times, five times, two times, I have broken off a lot of branches, and then squatted under the tree or simply sat on the pine branch to eat loose candy.Like eating candied haws, stick out your tongue and carefully lick the pine candy on each pine needle, savoring the sweetness in it... Some impatient guys just pulled it with their hands, and even stuffed the pine leaves into their mouths.

Of course, if you think eating one by one is not enough, everyone still has a way, that is to tie the aluminum wine lid of the liquor bottle with a wire to make a simple small crucible.

Then collect some dry firewood to make a fire, pour the pine sugar into the wine cover and roast it on the fire.In less than 5 minutes, the white pine sugar melted completely, and after cooling, it turned into a small piece of brown, which was very similar to the candy bought on the street.Stuff a whole piece of pine candy into your mouth, and the taste will make you forget the cold weather instantly, and just feel the sweetness in your mouth...

There are usually very few trees that grow sugar pine, so the children quickly cleared it up when they found it.But there are exceptions. I remember one time they found three big pine trees side by side full of pine sugar.So several bear children joined forces, went up to the tree and shook the branches together, knocked the pine needles to the ground, and then jumped under the tree to pick them up, and put the pine candy and pine needles into the schoolbag together.

Liu Junhao collected a bowl full of pine candy that time, and he ate it for a week.

However, the pine sugar is very strange. It appears without warning and goes away quickly. It is often that the trees were still hanging on the tree yesterday, and the pine sugar disappears without a trace in just one night.

He often ate pine candy when he was a child, but in recent years, he rarely had the opportunity to eat it.This is mainly because he is too lazy to run into the mountains when it is cold, and it is easy to miss opportunities.

Now grab a few pine candies and put them in your mouth. It is as sweet as ever, with a slight pine needle flavor.Described in the current language, it is rosin, which is a pure natural green food.

"Xiaohao, what are you eating, kid?" The two people behind picked up stones for a while, and now they rushed over.Seeing that he was sitting on a rock and eating something, Old Wang couldn't help asking.

"Good stuff, try it," Liu Junhao said, sending the pine branch in front of the two of them, and pointed to the pine candy on it.

"What is this?" Professor Zhao picked one and put it in his mouth with doubts, and suddenly a sweetness entered his throat, "Soil honey? How can honey be produced on pine trees? This bee is not the same as the one in your yard, is it?" ?”

From the appearance, this pine sugar is indeed very similar to honey, both the size of rice grains, but the color is wrong.

"It's not honey, it's pine sugar grown from pine trees," Liu Junhao explained slightly.

"Pine sugar... Pine trees can grow sugar? You thought it was a Christmas tree." Mr. Wang turned to look at Professor Zhao, hoping that the experts could explain it to him.

"Don't look at me, it's the first time I've heard of loose sugar." Professor Zhao also found it incredible now, and asked again: "Why didn't I see this thing last year?"

"That's because you didn't look for it carefully. There must be one. Every winter and autumn, someone goes up the mountain to find it. They even went to the township annals before." Liu Junhao was a junior high school student in the town. At that time, there was a classmate whose father was a small leader in the town. .In order to show off, the student specially took the local chronicle to the class for everyone to circulate.Liu Junhao once read it carefully, and it mentioned the pine sugar in Daqing Mountain, which was recorded as an anecdote.

"Usually what season does pine sugar appear... Can you see turpentine when pine sugar appears..." Professor Zhao asked several questions in succession.After Liu Junhao finished his answer, he nodded and said, "I roughly figured out that this pine sugar should be an intermediate product of turpentine."

"Pine resin, you said this thing is pine resin?" Old Wang was taken aback by this conclusion, he had eaten a lot just now.

"How is it possible?" Liu Junhao objected immediately.It's not like he hasn't seen rosin before, it's obviously different from this thing.

"Don't worry, let me tell you slowly. Do you know how pine resin is formed? The chloroplasts in the pine needles are exposed to the sun, but unfortunately absorb and use sunlight for photosynthesis. Under the action of chlorophyll and enzymes, The obtained carbon dioxide and water are synthesized into organic matter such as sugar and protein, and oxygen is released at the same time.

The sugars formed by photosynthesis go through a series of complex chemical and biological reactions, pass through a series of intermediate products, and finally form rosin in the secretory cells of the xylem.

This is how rosin is formed under normal circumstances, and if something unexpected happens, something else will form.

As you said just now, pine sugar usually only appears when the weather drops sharply in autumn and winter. That is because the crystallization temperature of this sugar is relatively low.Once the sugar has no time to undergo chemical and biological reactions in the pine tree, it will form crystals.We all know that there are many pores on the surface of the pine tree, which causes the liquid sugar in the pine tree to crystallize and then be discharged from the body along the pores.

Also because the pine needle is the key part of photosynthesis, most of the pine sugar is concentrated there. "

Reasonable and well-founded, Liu Junhao felt that this was really the case.However, when he thought that the final state of pine candy was turpentine, he was a little scared, and hurriedly asked: "Then... can this pine candy be eaten?"

"According to what you just said, there should be no problem. After all, turpentine can be taken. Isn't it recorded in the book that Sun Simiao, the king of medicine, has a special liking for pine trees, and he also created the 'method of taking pine nuts, pine leaves, and turpentine'" With natural health preservation methods, he finally lived to be more than 140 years old." Professor Zhao has collected this kind of health preservation methods before, so he is quite familiar with turpentine.

"Then I'll make more." Hearing that it can preserve health, Pharaoh got excited and insisted that Liu Junhao go to the tree and shake the pine candy for him.

Helpless, Liu Junhao had no choice but to go up the tree again, while Professor Zhao was busy below.

The three of them were busy for more than half an hour, and finally collected a large handful of loose candies.

When I got home, I made some pine sugar and threw it into the boiling water. Suddenly, a faint scent of rosin floated out, which was refreshing.

Liu Junhao didn't taste anything, but felt that it was far worse than his own local honey.On the contrary, after drinking, Professor Zhao continued to praise "the pine nuts fall in the empty mountain, and the lonely person should not sleep", which seemed to really express some artistic conception.

After drinking two cups of tea, Mr. Wang began to play with the small stones he picked up just now like a treasure, saying that he would put them in the fish tank when he returned home in a few days.

"What do you think the pattern on this stone looks like?" He suddenly picked up a stone and put it on the table for the two to enjoy.

"Steamed buns...or are they sesame seed cakes?" Mr. Zhao usually boasted that he was elegant, but he ate them all when he ate them.

"Carrot?" Liu Junhao followed behind.The stone is round and round like jade, with a large piece of white and clean on it, the only pattern is that there is an oval-like mark in the middle.There are a few strands of light blue on the oval, and suddenly it looks a bit like a tasseled white radish.

"What kind of eyes do you all have? You don't have any appreciation level at all." Old Wang looked at Professor Zhao with a very contemptuous expression.

Mr. Zhao blushed for a rare time, looked carefully at the stone again, and whispered: "Could it be peaches... These are peach leaves?"

"Bring it to me." Pharaoh couldn't bear it anymore, and snatched the stone into his hands, "This is a vivid picture of Taibai drunk!"

"What?" Liu Junhao originally thought that his imagination would be rich enough to say that he was a radish, but he didn't expect that the old man would be so unsurprising and endless.

Taibai is drunk, where is Li Taibai?He leaned forward to look at it again, and felt that it still looked like a carrot.

I sneaked a glance at Professor Zhao, and found that he didn't see it either.

"Look at this ellipse, isn't it just a big wine vat. And this one, that's Li Bai's beard, with a drunken beard, how comfortable..."

Liu Junhao only nodded his head. In order to show that he was not so ignorant, he nodded his head like a chicken pecking rice.

"Yes, yes. You look at this wine tank...that's a big one." Professor Zhao also echoed blindly.

"And this stone, look..." The more Mr. Wang looked at it, the more interested he became, and he picked out another stone.

Appreciating strange stones, you don't care about the shape, only by immersing in them can you get the three flavors.

Liu Junhao knew that his level was not enough, so he didn't make a fool of himself there, so he hurried to find someone to explain and go home.

Sitting in the courtyard, he secretly opened the stone lock.

When wandering up the mountain just now, he found a small piece of thorny nest buds that had just been unearthed, so he dug a lot and put them in the stone lock.

Plant them in the sand as soon as possible while you are free now.

When his wife came back from school, Liu Junhao pulled her to the stone slab and asked, "What do you think the patterns on this stone look like?" This is to test whether Zhang Qian has artistic talents.

"It doesn't look like anything, it kind of looks like a pockmarked face."

"Look carefully again, what do you think this mark looks like?" Liu Junhao pointed to a few gray marks on the slate and said.

"I can't tell, what do you think it looks like?" Zhang Qian asked back.

"This is a living picture of the 'Xuanwu Negative Monument', look at the traces..." He repeated it according to Mr. Wang's analysis just now.

"Nonsense!" Zhang Qian immediately rolled her eyes.

* * *
Note: I searched the Internet for a long time for the cause of the formation of pine sugar, but there was no explanation. The part about the formation process of pine sugar in the article was a speculation of a biology teacher when I was in junior high school.After listening to it, I thought it made sense, so I wrote it out.If there are any mistakes, I hope everyone will forgive me.

(End of this chapter)